Bluetooth low energy (BLE) is a wireless personal area network technology designed and marketed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group aimed at novel applications, in particular in the fields of healthcare, fitness, security and home entertainment. Compared to ‘classic or conventional Bluetooth’ BLE is intended to provide considerably reduced power consumption and cost while maintaining a similar communication range.
With classical BLE systems at least a pair of BLE devices, one of which denoted as a peripheral and the other one of which denoted as a hub, are operable to establish a communication link. Typically, the peripheral device advertises or broadcasts while the hub scans. Once the hub identifies a suitable peripheral device it requests a connection, pairs with the peripheral device and takes control over the peripheral device. At that time, the peripheral device stops advertising and communication becomes ‘closed’ so that communication is solely established between the hub and the peripheral device. For implementation of such a standard method, a complete BLE stack of hardware must be implemented for both BLE devices. In addition, once the communication between the pair of BLE devices has been established the communication takes place point-to-point. It is only visible to the hub and to the connected peripheral device.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is another wireless standard to use electromagnetic fields to transfer data, especially for the purpose of automatically identifying and tracking tags attached to objects. RFID-based communication is widely used for different application purposes. RFID tags have been attached to cash, clothing and/or possessions. It is even conceivable that RFID tags are implanted in animals or persons. There are basically two standard development organizations ISO/IEC JTC 1 and GS1/EPCglobal that define the vast majority of RFID data standards used globally. One example is the electronic product code (EPC) tag data standard which is used to encode passive RFID tags with data for logistics purposes in the retail supply chain. EPC-encoded RFID tags are inexpensive but suffer from comparatively short communication ranges and require the retailer to make a significant investment in dedicated reader hardware and software.